Personal – Page 7 – An Echo That's Reversing

Suite for Turntables and Piano — Approaching a new instrument

Once I’d heard about it, I looked far and wide for Ferneyhough’s book of essays and composer interviews but could only find it for $1,300+ used on Amazon (ik,r?) and listed elsewhere as out of stock. Some sites had PDFs but they were generally pay-to-view (Scribd is the main culprit, per usual). Several pages in to the Google results I found a very sketchy-looking site that had it for download. Cool with me. Pages are scanned with greater-or-lesser quality, some clean, some absurdly skewed as they were pressed against the copy machine but still readable. Later, I found a scan a bit cleaner but from an equally sketchy site. Also cool with me.

Suite for Turntables and Piano — Notation

Different from when I finished the symphony, near the end of finishing the string quartet I immediately had an idea for this next work. The in-between-time in this instance is not downtime, but rather a period spent on research.

For (manymany) years I’d had the idea but never had the resources–or perhaps commitment–to approach it. The concept was a natural result of a classical/modernist listener who early on listened to Qbert, Invisibl Skratch Piklz, Shadow, et al. Choosing a sonata-like approach was an equally natural result for something that lends itself best as a solo instrument.

String Quartet No. 1

Cover: Suzan Woodruff, *Monsoon I*, acrylic on panel, 2003

String Quartet No. 1 – Slow, and keeping my sanity

Today I spent an hour and a half writing three measures the second violin. The time I put towards composing each day is minimal but it also helps me reset. For the past month I’ve had to put in 12-hour days at work, so any time I can put towards composing is valuable. I don’t let my work life bleed into my music life and, ignoring all keen psychological analysis to the contrary, I feel that I’ve kept it separate.

String Quartet No. 1 – Pausing the first movement, beginning the second, stealing

The value in writing a complex rhythm such as, say, a dotted quarter followed by a dotted eighth followed by a dotted sixteenth, is not for the exactitude of the performance but for the communication to the performer that these are all notes of diminished length that should feel like dotted notes. That is: notes that have not-quite-finished and are expecting another note to rhythmically appear just before the end of their time.